The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- Author
- Milan Kundera written by
- Publisher
- Minumsa | Published 2009-12-24
- Category
- Fiction
- Book description
- Meet the masterpiece of Milan Kundera, the greatest writer of the 20th century! Minumsa World...
A book must be read again. Reading it once, you can't really empathize with what story it's telling. The first time you read, you read centered on the 'narrative,' and the second time you read while thinking about what this book is trying to say. Before, I had read it as a 'love' story centered on Tereza and Tomáš, Sabina and Franz. Of course I had thought about the 'eternal return of Nietzsche' in the early part of the novel. But it hadn't struck my mind with such a heavy 'thud' as I'm thinking now. It was a point where I empathized firsthand that it must be read twice.
As Anna Karenina and Ferdydurke echoed in my mind, I experienced firsthand what it means that things invisible before become visible. On that train station platform where 'Anna Karenina' met Vronsky, Anna brings her life to a close with 'death.' Some say this is a 'symmetrical structure' that can only be used in a 'novel,' but people also entrust and cast their lives into such 'chance.' One cannot criticize this as being 'chance.' A person's life is all nothing but 'chance.' It's all chance disguised as necessity. Because—why is it chance disguised as necessity?—for example, even if in the end I like buying bags most, whether I'll go to a department store with a million won and buy a bag or not is unknown. Just because I like it most, must I necessarily buy a 'bag'? No. I can make my actions resemble 'necessity,' but I never move by necessity. The fact that my thoughts waver due to each and every fact is also all 'chance.' And that chance tells us that we live by 'lightness,' not 'heaviness.'
Through the 'eternal return' Nietzsche mentioned, Milan Kundera says: life is, in the end, a 'one-way street' that can be experienced only once, and because of that there can be no experiencing in advance, and because of that it is generated by all 'chance' rather than 'necessity.' Just as there are no hypotheticals in history, life too has no hypotheticals. A person lives only once. And so there's no way to know whether following one's emotions is the right thing or the wrong thing. Because the variables differ at every single moment. Our life is only once. We merely make a choice at each moment; there can be no first, second, or third case. Aren't expectation and actuality different?
While tossing and turning beside the sleeping Tereza, a remark she'd casually tossed out a few years ago came to mind. While they were talking about their friend Z, she said, \"If I hadn't met you, I'd surely have fallen in love with him.\"
Even at the time, hearing those words, Tomáš had fallen into a strange melancholy. He suddenly realized the fact that Tereza's falling in love with him rather than his friend Z was thoroughly a matter of chance. In the kingdom of possibility, besides the love realized with Tomáš, there exist countless unrealized loves with other men.
We all believe we cannot even conceive of love as something light, something that carries no weight at all. We imagine that our love must necessarily be this kind of thing. We also believe that without love, our life would no longer be life. We're convinced that even the gloomy Beethoven, with his terrible shaggy hair, himself played his 'Es muss sein' for our great love.
Because of such 'chance,' I think it's not the 'Es muss sein' mentioned in this book, but 'Es konnte auch anders sein' that's correct. It could perfectly well have been different. Not 'it must be so.' Surely, before, in my values I always cried out that 'it must be so.' Whatever it was, I cried out, according to my values, that 'it must be so.' But now I want to cry out, little by little, that 'it could perfectly well have been different.' That way I want to change 'heaviness' into 'lightness' bit by bit. I want to accept this moment, of which Parmenides speaks, where the negative turns positive. The change from heaviness to lightness. However, because Tomáš's lightness is so utterly different from the heaviness Tereza wants, they live to the end bound to each other while being different from each other. Among Tomáš's lightnesses, the disposition like that of a 'womanizer,' and that kind of 'lightness' of wanting to conquer every woman, differs from my values, so although I 'could' do it, I don't want to.
The lightness of Tomáš that I want to think about and learn lies elsewhere. Tomáš says to Tereza at the end. That his life was not destroyed because of her. I merely lived a life according to my own choices. Whatever anyone says, I have to bear the responsibility. And I'm ready to do so. Of course, it's true that countless other people and circumstances influenced me. That can't be denied. But even that is all nothing but 'chance.' Those factors are not all 'necessity.' They merely came to me by chance. There aren't many parts of my life I could necessarily make. I think it's through such chances gathering that I form 'lightness.' There's nothing that can be thought of as 'it must be so.' No matter how much one cries 'Es muss sein,' reality more often than not becomes 'Es konnte auch anders sein.' The fact that what I said 'absolutely must be so' really turned out that way—I want to call it 'chance.' So I've decided to live with Parmenides's affirmation, with lightness, at the center of my heart.
A person, in the end, has only one life. If so, comparison with other lives is very meaningless. Because a life that comes only once, however that life turns out, already has sufficient value in and of itself. That's why it's very light. I want to call it a lightness that holds heaviness within.
We will never be able to gauge precisely how far our relationship with others is the result of our emotions, our love or non-love, our goodwill or hatred, or how far it was predetermined by the dynamics between individuals.
True human goodness can be bestowed purely and freely only upon those who possess no power whatsoever. Humanity's true moral test, its most fundamental test, lies in its relationship with those who have been entrusted entirely to our mercy. Namely, animals. It is precisely here that humanity's fundamental failure occurs, and this failure is so fundamental that all other failures stem from it.
The irony of love is that it brings a sense of happiness while being destructive. The union of positive energy and negative energy could be called precisely love. This irony of feeling an emotion of 'heartache' even amid liking and growing happy ambiguously occurs in 'love.' In loving someone and expressing that emotion, that is. But the ways of expressing that 'love' all differ from one another. Some people give a handmade craft into which they've carefully poured their heart, give a cake or chocolate they made themselves. They buy a bag or necklace, go on a date to a place where the heart finds peace. How these 'ways' will apply to the other person cannot be known. There can be no 'comparison.' It's not a second or third case—each is its own 'first' case. Therefore, even if one acts with 'goodwill,' thinking the other person will be glad, since humans judge the other person according to their own values, not according to the other person's values, one cannot know how the other person will react. One merely 'expects' to some degree.
The relationship between Tomáš and Tereza was like that too. Tereza wanted 'special treatment' different from other women. But Tomáš, although he treated Tereza specially, in the end—though with a different feeling—kissed her in the 'same way' and caressed her in the same way, and did not distinguish Tereza's body from other women's bodies. Because of this, Tereza fails at the escape she sought from a 'matriarchal society' and gradually comes to strangle Tomáš.
I want to talk about the 'kitsch' that Sabina confronted. Kitsch is hard to explain, but if I say just one thing simply, it could be called 'violence.' Violence against the rejection of totalitarianism—that, I want to call kitsch. Kitsch is totalitarian. It denies and tries to destroy any value other than its own rising up. It's as if it holds the irony of having to use totalitarianism in order to destroy totalitarianism. For her, this 'totalitarianism' is both the cause that drove Sabina herself to lead 'destruction' and 'betrayal,' and also its result. Sabina, who comes to taste emptiness at the end of 'betrayal,' is far too unhappy. At least in my view. Within the result she wanted, she feels 'emptiness.' As a person of Eastern Europe, as a woman who had to hide being Czech, her life was destroyed by the kitsch called communism.
The dog was never expelled from paradise. Karenin knows nothing and understands nothing of the duality of soul and body. That's why Tereza felt good and at ease being beside him.
Amid such confused thoughts, a blasphemous thought she could not at all shake off sprouted in Tereza's soul. The love connecting her and Karenin is better than the love that exists between herself and Tomáš.------ Tereza wants nothing from Karenin. She doesn't even force love. She has never once asked the question that torments a human couple. All these doubts—doubting love, weighing it, probing it, examining it—might destroy love from its very bud. If we cannot love, it's probably because we want to be loved. In other words, it's because we want something else (love), rather than approaching another person with no demands and asking only for their existence.
And there's something else. Tereza accepted Karenin as he was and didn't try to change him into her own image. From the very start she accepted the dog's universe that he possessed and didn't want to confiscate it, nor did she feel jealousy about his secret inclinations. (Not like a husband wanting to change his wife, and a woman wanting to change a man.)
What I've agonized over most recently was my own romantic relationship. I've never thought about why my relationship is so hard. I'm only thinking that now is much more unfairly hard than before, though. Humans dislike repetition. If you do the same thing for them every day, in the end they get sick of it and come to want something else. Because I'm not a being who gains happiness through 'repetition,' it's very hard for me. Rather, 'repetition' is often a major cause of happiness disappearing. Intermittent contact often appears to feel closer than daily contact. A letter going once a week becomes, at some point, nothing at all. The person making contact, too, watching the other person change, gradually develops a strange feeling. Wondering why it's becoming like this.
A love that, rather than changing the other person, accepts them as they are, with no relations of interest—is it really a 'dream'? That's what I'm questioning now. Whether in my own romantic relationship or someone else's, is saying 'if I change this much, you have to change this much too' really the correct answer? I think that, depending on the part, very devoted concession is also necessary. Not every part can be 'two-way' consideration, and I come to feel discomfort from a partner who keeps bringing up this two-way consideration. With all the devoted consideration I once took on having all disappeared.
Human time does not revolve in a circle but advances in a straight line. Because happiness is the desire for repetition, the reason humans cannot be happy is also for this very reason.
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